What are the main challenges and opportunities for fiber optics in the aerospace industry?

The main advantage to fiber optic communication vs traditional copper based communication is the ability to transmit high bandwidth signals over much longer distances. The higher the bandwidth and the longer the distance, the greater the advantage. For modern digital signals, with distances over ~1,000m or bandwidth over ~1Tb/s, fiber optic transmission quickly becomes the only viable alternative.

High strength single mode optical fibers, with specialized florine based acrylate buffer coatings have been manufactured for missile payout and fiber optic gyroscopic (FOG) applications. Fiber optic probes have bern developed for medical applications such as macular degeneration eye surgery as well as gall bladder removal.

Fiber’s non-conductive, high bandwidth optical transmission, inherent security from tapping, lightning protection, and isolation from electrical ground loops and shorts, are significant advantages. Fiber cables are used for visible lighting for Christmas trees to optical power delivery for scopes and imaging/laser probes used for minimally invasive surgery and endoscopic procedures. Plastic optical fiber and low cost connectors are used for music systems. Fiber’s low infrared laser power loss is ideal for robotic machining precision cuts in materials used in the Aerospace Industry. Selecting proper fiber type/buffer connector, cable construction/jacketing is very important to the overall system performance.

In addition, matching the correct type of optical connectors, sources, devices and detectors, with the specific fiber types to be employed, will become more and more important..

New single mode PCFs have recently shown much promise for low loss/:high bandwidth optical transmission over long distances. An important aspect of optical fiber system manufacturing in the future will be to master the ability to efficiently optically couple different types of optical fibers with low loss optical photonic integrated circuits (PICs) where the light signals are produced, processed and detected.

POFs are typically multimode and provide the advantage of low cost field connectorization with the added cost of more limited bandwidth than singlemode fibers provide. These fibers are generally used for applications such as low cost data transmissions and audio network applications.

Single mode optical fibers are manufactured with buffer coatings and jacket materials such polyamide and kapton for outer space communication systems and networks. High strength fibers are used for their wide temperature range performance in harsh environments such as underground seismic data collection for oil and gas exploration. Fibers have been manufactured inside a laser welded stainless steel metal tube (FIMT), for down-hole data logging systems. Fiber is also used for distributed feedback fiber(DFB) temperature sensing applications.

High bandwidth fiber optic systems will continue to be essential for future communication systems, especially for secure high bandwidth communication networks using quantum key distribution (QKD) technology. These networks will be crucial to essure essential data encryption security. In addition, future optical networks using entangled photons transmitted over single mode fibers, PCFs, and other fibers types, will provide the connectivity for future quantum based optical links and networking.